Buzz’s “fuck you” exhortation was, oddly enough, aimed at his fans, but more specifically those who want to take from him without giving. “People nowadays have a highly developed sense of entitlement regarding music and I don’t know where it comes from,” is how he puts it more calmly. In talking to King Buzzo about his band’s storied career, one theme kept popping up: “We’re fucked!” is how Buzzo explains the plight of a veteran band in today’s crumbling music-biz climate. “Ipecac [Melvins’ label since 1999] will maybe survive one more album for us. Then it’s gonna be done. I mean, do you think that I’ll find a label out there that will be willing to put out a record for me? No way! It’s not gonna be the same as it was. You wanna buy an album from me? It’s gonna be $25, minimum. That’s it. You don’t want to buy it, move on. Because, you know, the music’s free. You’re gonna hear it for free, because someone’s gonna put it on the Internet. There’s nothing I can do about that. So if you want something tangible, not just some zeros and ones, then you’re gonna have to pay for it. That’s reality.”

One might think that Buzz’s axe to grind would follow to the major label system that alienated the record-buying public, was late to the game on Internet technology, and has spent its entire existence watering down vital musical subcultures. But one would be wrong.

“I see it this way: you have a major label that was willing to give a band like the Melvins $25,000 to make a record. What was wrong with that? Nothing! And will that ever happen again? No. So you can view that as them being heavily bloated and overblown and stupid, or you can view it as that they actually had the good sense to give money to us. Someone was willing to underwrite something interesting, and that ain’t gonna happen again. When nobody is willing to invest money in music, what happens? Less good music gets made.”

It’s not hard to detect traces of bitterness and defensiveness in Buzz’s rant — and maybe a weariness in having to fight constantly to keep doing what he does, even though he never wants to pander to make the music that he is so awesome at making. “People keep talking about vinyl being back — vinyl is dead! I don’t care what anyone tells you. They’re wrong. They’re wrong about everything. I mean, the general public — and I love to generalize — the general public is wrong about almost every single thing.”

Now this was clearly the curmudgeon engine that had fueled the aggro genius of so much of the band’s work all these decades. Record labels may come and go, but Buzz’s dogged pissed-off-edness will clearly endure when there is nothing but cockroaches and styrofoam to keep us company in the endtimes.

Will Boston's rap scene teach through tragedy? Parking is scarce in Medford Square this morning. Carloads of folks arrive over the course of an hour, eventually filling the Gaffey Funeral Home and spilling onto High Street. The crowd is here to honor Johnny Hatch, a father, boyfriend, son, and Hub rap veteran who was shot to death in his Medford home two weeks ago.

The Big Hurt: Rihanna/Brown media roundup Hey, remember when Chris Brown beat his beloved celebrity girlfriend to the point of hospitalization, and it looked like, thank goodness, he totally wouldn't get away with it?

SXSW 2012 marks the end of the superstars In his keynote speech, informally anointed King of Music, Sir Bruce Springsteen, gave some uncle-ly advice to all the young'uns with their deathmetals and their trollgazes who made up the complicated and chaotic mass that was this year's SXSW talent pool/conference of musical commodity farmers: he pointed out that a ticket to a show is "a handshake between the artist and the fan."

The dance-music scene heats up Austin "Like in 10 years, this is Lollapalooza— we're just ahead of shit," said Nick Hook of Cubic Zirconia on Saturday night, toward the tail end of his solo set during SBTRKT's collaborative shindig with burgeoning UK-label Young Turks.

THE STROKES | COMEDOWN MACHINE | March 18, 2013 The Strokes burst out in a post-9/11 musical world with a sound that was compact and airtight, melodies coiled frictionlessly in beats and fuzzed vocals.

GLISS | LANGSOM DANS | February 01, 2013 If rock and roll is three chords and the truth, then the mutant genre offspring shoegaze can be summed up as one chord, three fuzzboxes, and a sullen, muttered bleat.